OS X Software: CleanArchiver

One of the things that has always bothered me about OS X's built-in ZIP compression is the fact that it includes DS_Store and icon file data. It's not a big deal if you're only transferring ZIPs between Macs (for the files are invisible), but if you're distributing ZIPs to the rest of the computing world, they'll see the Mac's trash.

For a while now I've used DropStuff to get around this annoyance, but the app is shareware, and I've never really seen the point of registering compression software (does anyone register WinZip?).
So I was delighted to stumble across a free alternative: CleanArchiver.

This little gem is a Universal Binary, archives to gzip, bzip2, zip and compressed Disk Images, and comes with a variety of options to control which data you'd like to include/exclude from your archives. To use it, you just drag a file / folder onto the app icon, it launches, creates an archive based on your default setting, and quits. Simple and easy.

So if you create ZIPs you need to share, and are fussy about these types of things, throw CleanArchiver into your dock.